Mumford & Sons Diagnosed With Rare Strain Of Bono-Itis!

Mumford and Sons NOW: Serious, brooding, as if the weight ofthe world rests on their shoulders.

For the past few weeks, there has been a lot of online chatter about how bad the new Mumford & Sons album, Wilder Mind, was based on the release of two songs prior to the album's release last week. Those songs, "Believe" and "The Wolf", gave fans a taste of the band's updated sound, which featured noticeably modern instrumentation and production and met with a deluge of negative feedback not seen since Dylan went electric.

Considering that the songs themselves don't outright suck - they're perfectly acceptable slabs of modern pop that Chris Martin would be proud to call his own - why all the hate, you ask?

Well, it may have to do with the pressure of such huge success and the temptation to use that fame and influence to project larger messages in your songs, leading you to paint with broader musical strokes rather than the smaller detailed ones you used to great success. It happens to everyone, it seems, and even has a name, albeit one not yet acknowledged by the medical community: Bono-itis.

Mumford and Sons THEN: Playful, yet serious in their quest for buried treasure.

Those suffering from Bono-itis also include Coldplay's Chris Martin, who went so far as to hire Brian fucking Eno to produce his band's Viva La Vida album in 2008, and Brandon Flowers of the Killers, who hoped to tap into that aesthetic by hiring Anton Corbijn to snap the cover for their second album, Sam's Town.

What's odd about Marcus Mumford's condition is that he suffers from a rare form of Bono-itis known as "Chris Martin as Bono-itis", which is doubly bad because it makes all new material sound like warmed-over Coldplay, post Parachutes.

We should have seen the signs before now, of course, since the band's breakthrough album, Babel, was, in fact, produced by Coldplay producer Markus Dravs, who was heavily influenced by and has worked with U2 producer Brian Eno.

The main symptom of Bono-itis is a complete loss of musical identity, i.e., the unique sound that made them famous in the first place. While there is no cure for Bono-itis, it does not afflict the singers directly but, rather, the fans of such artists now forced to stomach their newly generic musical offerings and can be treated with healthy doses of ridicule directed squarely at said band or artist.

So when people are publicly critical of the new Mumford and Sons album, they aren't being assholes, their merely managing their disease.